The Alpha King's Princess
The Alpha King’s Princess – Chapter 28

He quirked an eyebrow at me as I stared up at him and licked my lips. My mouth was draw and I felt that heat from back in the forest rushing through me. His eyes started to fill with moonlight, though he didn’t move.

Then, I thought of Sibyl and pulled back. I didn’t know what to do with myself or what to say. I wanted to ask about the vampire, about his father, about the woman in the photo too, but I couldn’t manage the words.

“Are you okay?”

My lips twitched. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I reached for the glass, letting our hands brush against each other. I felt the zing of attraction shoot through me as I pulled the milk towards me. I lifted the glass to my mouth and started to drink. He never took his eyes off me. The moonlight in his eyes didn’t fade as he watched me.

When the glass was empty, I offered the glass back to him.

He didn’t move. For a moment, we just stared at each other. The hyper-awareness returned anew and my eyes trailed over the skin of his chest. I heard his heartbeat speeding up. His breath came a little faster as I let my daze drift.

My face burned with embarrassment as I openly ogled him, but I couldn’t stop. He was just so beautiful. I wanted to run my tongue up the valley of his chest, up his neck and bite.

I drew back from that thought, shaking myself. I looked away from him and thrust the glass towards him.

“Thanks.”

“How was your training?”

“I managed,” I said, my heart twisting with anger.

“You’re upset with me.”

I glanced at him and wiggled the glass. He stepped closer, looming over me, but I didn’t feel threatened. He lifted my face by my chin and forced me to look up at him. The scent of his warm skin and the soap he used was dizzying. My heart was racing. I wanted so much that I couldn’t even think. He drew closer, barely a few centimeters away from brushing our lips together. Before I could lean forward, he lifted his lips out of the way and pressed them to my forehead. He cupped my face and held me still as if I was precious.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently, skimming his lips across my brow. “I haven’t forgotten my promise to train you.”

“You’re busy. It’s fine.”

“It is a promise, Hedy. I apologize for being pulled away.” He pulled back. “Next time.”

Next time what? Would he k**s me? Would he stay until we were done? Would there be more?

I didn’t ask him any of that. I just nodded. He gave me another k**s to my forehead. His fingers trailed over my shoulder and down the back of my arm until he took the glass from my hand.

“Get some rest, Hedy. Allen told me you took another run before coming in.”

I nodded. “Love you… Good night.”

“I love you,” he said softly. His voice seemed heavy and almost pained. I slipped back into my room and rested my back against the door. I heard him lingering just outside my door. I worried my l*p, getting lost in the soothing sound of his heart and waiting for him to either knock on my door or go.

It felt like hours had passed before he turned and hurried away from my door.

I could almost imagine him hesitating with knocking, wanting to know, but something had changed his mind. Was it because I still wasn’t of age or because he was just concerned about how little I had said.

To be fair, he hadn’t said much either. Though heat had been stirring through me, it had been awkward with everything I wanted to say and couldn’t.

I pushed those thoughts aside and returned to my Moon Shadow laptop. The hyper-awareness had faded enough for me to concentrate. I tagged the woman’s photo and Candido’s birth records before moving on to the latest report from the moving teams and the search I’d run about the script in the book about vampires.

Nothing had come up for the search, but the move of all of our servers had been complete and they were ready for me to install the new security system. As I waited for the system to install the programs, I opened the book on vampires, squinting at it. The script felt familiar the more I stared at it, but I couldn’t remember where I would have seen it. It wasn’t like any language I read regularly.

With a sigh, I got out of bed and went to the window to look out into the night sky. The moon was high over the Estate, lighting the tops of the trees gently. If I was the type to pray, I might have offered some words of prayer to the Moon Goddess right now, but all I could manage to do was open the window and sight into the wind that drifted into my bedroom.

It rustled everything in my room and brought the calming scent of the forest into my room. I thought of running with Candido and being lost in the wonder of the trees and the joy of just chasing after him. In my mind’s eye, we ran full speed through the forest. Laughing and enjoying ourselves. He was fast, but with my powers, I caught up to him, tackling him to the ground.

We’d tussle a bit in the leaves, laughing and excited. His hands would roam over me, teasing at something more than just a game of tag. We were happy and comfortable, as if we were always meant to be that way.

A beep pulled me out of the daydream. I turned around and frowned at the warning flashing across my computer’s screen. I closed the window and went to the laptop. The installation was still in progress and nothing was wrong there. The warning was a message, a flag responding to the triggers I had placed on the inter-pack policing network.

I opened the warning, and the case reports appeared. Armageddon, the leader of our organization sent me a message.

Search for more incidents like this. Debrief by the end of the week.

I replied to him. I’ll have it done in a few hours.

You need sleep, Pandora. Be offline before one. That’s an order.

I huffed. Sleep was way less important than replaceing out what could be going on. Every moment that we didn’t know where and when the vampires would attack meant that they would cause more chaos and suffering to werewolves.

But I knew that Armageddon had override access and if I didn’t want him to restrict my access for a few days, the way he had before, I knew better than to disobey him.

One in the morning several hours from now. He must think that I’m in a different time zone to give me that deadline.

I opened the case report and realized that they were still analyzing the scene as I was reading their notes. I plugged in my headphones and hacked into the police feed.

“It’s not pretty… f*****g vampires.”

“What do you make of this? Looks like claws.”

My heart lurched as I scrolled through the photos and accessed the officer’s body cam. The officer speaking wasn’t the same one with a body camera on the scene. But once I accessed all the cameras on the scene, I could make out who had been speaking and where they were.

The claw marks were similar to the marks left in the Academy.

I worried my lips, switching between cameras until I reached one of the cops that was walking further into the area. Bodies were everywhere, left exactly where they’d dropped. Then, something stuttered and moved. My heart lurched.

“Who’s there?”

Silence came, then a figure shot past.

“Stop, police!”

The officers started pursuing. Several of them started to chase after the suspect, calling in the incident through their radios as I manipulated their cameras to zoom in. There was something about the person’s gait that was troubling. They had sudden and erratic bursts of speed. They were wearing the red of the Moon Goddess as they ran away.

When they hit the side of a tall building and started to scale it, leaping into the air, and scrambling up the side. The cameras stopped moving.

“How the hell could he do that?”

“Awakened,” the other officer said breathlessly. “We’ve got to report this.”

I took a screen shot of the building and put it through a search to figure out where they were. A few moments, the results declared that they were in the Yellow Forest Pack’s territory. It wasn’t right on the border between the vampire and werewolf lands, but it wasn’t far. It was only slightly bigger than the other pack where murders had taken place.

This only meant that vampires were starting to advance faster than we could have anticipated. I typed out a brief message to Armageddon and hoped that when the rest of the investigation was complete, we’d know more.